Top 10 Most Expensive Cities to Live in 2025

Cost-of-living indexes such as the Mercer and EIU surveys referenced in this list's description work by pricing a standardized basket of goods and services — housing, groceries, transport, utilities, entertainment — in each city and comparing the total. They are built primarily around the experience of relocating expatriates and international assignees, which is why premium, internationally-branded goods and centrally located rental housing are weighted heavily. A resident who has lived in a city for years, shops at local markets, and lives outside the most expensive districts often experiences meaningfully lower costs than the survey basket implies.

Several cities on this list combine extreme prices with correspondingly high local salaries — Zurich and Singapore both pair steep costs with strong average incomes that offset a meaningful share of the burden for local professionals. Others carry high costs without that same wage cushion for a large share of residents, which is a very different lived experience even at a similar survey ranking. Treating this list as a pure expense ranking, separate from local income levels, gives a more accurate read on what it actually costs to live comfortably in each place.

The cities here cluster into a few distinct cost drivers. Singapore, Hong Kong, and Zurich are priced primarily by their role as financial centers with severely constrained housing supply. Geneva's costs are driven heavily by its concentration of international organizations and an unusually wealthy expatriate population. San Francisco and New York are shaped by tech- and finance-sector income concentration colliding with housing scarcity. Sydney and Oslo lean more on lifestyle and resource-wealth premiums than on financial-sector density. Knowing which driver is pushing a given city's costs up says more about whether that city will stay expensive than the ranking position alone.